Foxglove
by Sarahtropolis
Summary: Two of Four Stories: Misae has always loved Shilah. Separated as children. Separated from her family. They find each other again.
1. Never

Never

* * *

I am five years old. Me and Shilah are rolling in the grass. Laughing. Do you know how I know he's happy? His little tail wags; and when he's nervous his tufty ears twitch. We are oblivious in the way children tend to be and then I hear the sharp hiss of, _You Disgust Me._

My mother was always a fighter, she throws her iced tea in the snarling old woman's faces, and lemon clings to the flowery polyester blouse. Mother herds me and Shilah into the trailer. One arched look from mother is never to be ignored.

People are always angry when they see us all together. Shilah thinks it's because me and mother are different from everybody else. I don't know what he means.

* * *

Ms S


	2. Fall

Fall

* * *

Shilah started school at thirteen. Later than most. Mother had taught us from home for many years before her sight began to fail. Cataracts. And with her sight her patience.

I didn't go with him. We had done most things together until then. Mother said I couldn't because we were different. He was a boy and this I had begun to notice more and more.

It was his body, once childishly soft and then coltish was becoming hard, warm muscle. His face which was once mischievous took on a dangerous edge. His eyes were the colour of buttercups, a solid type of yellow that looked like hard discs in the sun. I loved his eyes.

I loved Shilah.

At first I resisted the feeling. The warm creature that curled in the pit of my stomach pulling taut when I glanced at him and noted the small things. A muscle in his jaw. The rough inside of his fingertips. The pulsing vein in his ankle. His skin was brown two shades darker than my own and during the moonlight hours we were like alabaster and shadow beneath its light.

I spent lonely days in the yard between textbooks and daydreaming thinking of my first friend. My only friend.

"Misae." A voice chirps from beyond the fence that separates the rectangle of freshly mown grass from our trailer. "Misae." I lift my eyes from the textbook to the sky. I do not recognise the voice. "Hi there pretty girl." My name the stranger's lips make me shudder.

I sit up slowly and a figure is silhouetted against the brightness of the summer sun. I do not recognise him.

"Sae, honey. Come inside now." My mother's voice is urgent, it's _that_ tone that is not to be disobeyed so I go picking up my books and pencils.

"Hello Maiara." The voice drawls, losing the hint of softness when it had called my name. "Let her stay." I pause before the doors of the trailer and glance back over my shoulder.

"No."

My mother's hand is hard when it lands on my shoulder, fingertips digging into my skin.

"You knew this day would come, Mai."

"You son of a bitch." I had never heard my mother swear.

"She is not one of you."

"We don't know that."

"I think by now we all do."

"Sae, go inside." But I'm frozen beneath my mother's hand, rooted to the step, eyes fastened on the man's dark face. I can't distinguish his features because of the brightness of the light but I feel nothing but cold menace from his presence.

"You can chose, Mai." He said with a new hint of emotion in his voice, perhaps it is regret. "She can forfeit her life or she can forfeit any memory of this place and live out there. Like _them_."

"She's my daughter."

"You don't both have to suffer, Mai. I'll fight you if I have to."

I look up into my mother's eyes and her head slowly angles toward me, the milky pale circle of her cataracts are directed toward me but I don't know if she can see my face. I don't want to go anywhere. I don't want to die. She sees this last thought, I know she does, she sighs deeply and I know her decision has been made.

* * *

Ms S


	3. In

In

* * *

My memory is not complete. There is something broken in me but I can't define what this is. The _it_ that is missing. They tell me it's because I come from a broken home, abandoned at a tender age. They say that it's trauma - I turn my face away, maybe they're right. I wouldn't know the answer because my memory is not complete.

I sit on the fire escape overlooking a narrow alley that leads onto The Crawl, a bustling light filled place which is busy at morning because of the sprawling business and night, because of the lucrative opportunities for prostitutes.

There something jarring about the city. I don't feel like I belong in this place; mostly it's the smell that bothers me: metallic and smoggy and then sweet like the aftermath of cigarette smoke escaping a stranger's mouth.

I clutch the pendant that hangs at my throat, it's a reflect action now. The pendant is a gift from some distant point of my life, it's a silver plated foxglove. It's quiet ugly but after these longs years it's a comfort in my hand.

Inside the apartment my foster parents are bickering. I don't know what about. It always seems insignificant to me and so hide in the semi- solitude of the fire escape surrounded by the suffocating swarm of the city. Sometimes I stare at the moon and strange images flash past my mind's eye of two shades of skin pressed against one another beneath the silvery rays; one looks like alabaster and the other shadow. It means nothing in the end.

Someone whistles in the alley below and I peer between the bars to see the unmistakable figure of Jewel Smoke – not her true name – but one I know her by. She beckons my down from my perch and I go down obediently negotiating the rickety ladders and balconies of the fire escape with the confident air of having done this _many times_.

Jewel is known because of her eyes that are the myriad shades of citrine, emerald and at times amethyst. She is known as Smoke because she supplies the drug of the same name, it is a herb that has a distinctive smell, it blooms similar to orchid but it is not known as such. It is called Smoke and Jewel is called Smoke too.

"The Claw tonight." She says her eyes flashing iridescent in the lamp light.

I nod and smile with lips closed together because I don't share her fascination with the place, the press of sweat slicked bodies, the air dense with carnal purpose, it is not a place for the faint of heart because the denizens could eat you alive.

Although I'm not in the mood for company, I am mindful that Jewel may one day become useful to an orphan like me. Maybe she already was.

She lays her lips against mine and I grin to supress a shudder, they're always so cold, lifeless. It's not something I've ever gotten used to. She doesn't do it for pleasure, she does it possessively and I don't know why I allow it. I don't particularly like it. I am not her possession.

"Let's go." She sighs deeply. Whatever she had expected has now passed and she is resigned. She takes my hand in hers and pulls me away from The Crawl and toward The Claw.

* * *

The night has a creeping chill, it is autumn giving way to the first breath of winter and the air is crisp and everything takes on a faint sparkle. I cling to Jewel's hand and I don't know why, her skin is rarely warm and offers no real comfort. My own motives are unclear to me but it pleases her and she grips me harder.

We do not join the back of the queue but walk hand in hand between the arches and into the pungent and seething mass of The Devil's Claw. Jewel's eyes are the dark glitter of garnet as they pass over the indomitable bouncer; his eyes glance away. Everybody knows Lady Smoke.

The insides are much the same as the night before and the night before that; it is a warm press of darkly dressed, intoxicated young people, their faces flash in the strobe lights and I look away.

"I'll be right back, sugar." Jewel lays a kiss on my cheek and moves away in the serene and supremely arrogant way only she can.

The Claw was her domain, both a place for business and pleasure and it is not my place to make a fuss.

Like some things in life, The Devil's Claw requires presence and not participation. I can stand unnoticed like an ineffectual grotesque lingering on the edge of a building. I am stone. Heedless to the offers of a drink, of Smoke, of those inviting smiles. They are no temptation to me, the drink, the Smoke those _hungry_ smiles.

As with much my incomplete life I keep myself to myself. I am not ready to participate yet. That is until I see someone who I've never seen before and that someone sees me.

* * *

I know he's angry because his teeth are clenched together, there is a tightness in his square jaw that looks painful. His dark lashes veil a pair of bright eyes, the colour hard to discern in the so-so light of the alley behind the club. "Do you remember me?" His voice is so low it is almost a growl but it doesn't scare me.

I know he won't hurt me. I don't know how I know this.

"Should I?" I ask and watch him blink, he is surprised and irritated and beneath this all is a slow burning longing.

"I want to hurt you." He says and he is sincere, I can see his fingers clenching and unclenching with the need to lash out. I am an easy target but still I am not afraid.

"Where have you come from?" I ask. I note he is tall and the shadows caress his skin revealing muscle against the slenderness. He is muscled in a way a keen swimmer is but more than this, there is a canny suppleness to him that I cannot compare.

"You know where I come from." He replies acidly.

His tone hurts some part of myself I never knew could be hurt; I have never let anyone close and so I flinch and lower my eyes from the hard angles of his face.

I lick my bottom lip, a tell-tale sign of a decision being made before my hand darts out and I brush his bare arm with my fingertips. He jumps back as if I've hurt him with a mere touch or perhaps it is disgust I see in his expression.

"You don't get to touch me, Sae."

_Sae_. Is that my name? They had given me a different name: Mary Doe. The latter because they didn't know where I had come from the first because this was the name of the woman who had found me. _Sae_ is a decidedly different name. It is the name of a girl that smiles and laughs and loves and hopes. All these things are unfamiliar to me.

He sees something of the cogs turning in my head and a shadow of knowledge flitters through his eyes. Yellow. His eyes are yellow and unlike anything I have seen on a person, it reminds me of buttercups and in the glare of the light they look like hard yellow discs.

"Mare." Jewel bursts through the back door of The Claw. She always knows where to find me.

Jewel's demeanour changes at the sight of the boy - I don't know his name. I think I should if he knows mine.

"Not another step." He says softly but there's no mistake, it is a warning whether to Jewel or to me I can't discern because his eyes are hard yellow discs of hatred. Jewel goes strangely still. Unnaturally still.

"I don't take commands from animals." She replies coolly. "And neither does she." She nods toward me.

Her words are cruel and the sound of it rings in my ears like a carillon bell; an apology dies on my tongue as he growls as a dog growls when threatened. His teeth are bared and they are sharp. Unnaturally sharp. Something whispers in my mind. Is that memory? "He doesn't mean any harm." I intercede faintly but Jewel pays me no mind.

Perhaps the change in his appearance should have horrified me. It didn't.

"She is not one of you." Jewel says smugly. "She will never be one of you. Why else do you think Maira chose this for her? If you do what I think you're going to do you'll get yourselves both killed."

Then it happened. Something in the taste and temperature of the air changed. Something inside me changed. I watched as he doubled over pressing his fingers to the ground and there I watched as his hand became the paw of an animal. I remembered. _His ears twitched when he was nervous._ His ears were sticking straight up. _I knew his tail wagged when he was happy. _His tail pointed straight.

"Come and get it, doggy." Jewel murmurs as her mouth forms a misshapen grin.

They're going to fight, the air is static with imminent violence, and I can almost hear the tooth and claw and flesh colliding.

"Enough." The two syllables sound hard and loud from between my lips and the wolf slinks into the darkness and Jewel glances at me with her plucked brows arching dangerously.

* * *

Ms S


	4. Love

Love

* * *

I wrap my arms around Jewel's shoulders and press my lips to her icy cheek. "Let's go back inside." I whisper against the shell of her ear.

Tension seems to flow out of Jewel's skinny frame and I hold her tighter, pressing all my warmth against her sharp bones. Her head falls forward and eventually her cold hand grasps my arm and her touch greedily sucks the warmth from my skin.

I don't know how long we have been standing in this tableau. I start to notice the reek of the nearby garbage bins, the steady hum of traffic of the street beyond, the rise and swell of conversation from the queue snaking around The Claw.

I notice these things because I do not want to look at the boy.

"Come on, sugar." Jewel uses more strength than she ought to pull me inside, toward the warmth and bitter stench of the clubbing crowd.

We find a place to sit and her expression is tense. Calculating. Then she turns her eyes that have gone as pale as diamond on my face and I feel fear.

"You just saw a guy turn into an animal." She says. Her lips are thin and long eyelashes half veil those discomfiting eyes.

"Did I? Perhaps it was the Smoke." I murmur my reply.

"Perhaps." She is not convinced.

I don't know how I knew it but I felt I was in danger. My mouth fills with the coppery taste of fear and the light headed feeling of panic. "Stay here, sugar. I won't be a minute." She says a bonelessly siddles from her chair and slips into the crowd.

I am going to die. I close my eyes for a full minute as the knowledge seeps in.

Of course Jewel Smoke would not do this herself it she could help it. In her perverse way she is fond of me.

I watch in mounting trepidation as two dark figures slip purposefully toward the back exit of the club where the 'wolf is. They are going to kill him. There is an inevitability about the whole affair.

I run.

* * *

I am a coward. The knowledge hits me like a fist and I run home feeling as if I've huffed acrid Smoke and I'm having a bad trip. Every shadow carries menace, eyes and teeth hide in the depths, the barely there slender limbed scuttling creatures smile at me.

I walk The Crawl because it is lit up with neon and lamplight, shadows are pushed to the far reaches of the street; The Crawl is alive with slowly trawling cars and its whores are loud and cheerful. It's the rush hour.

No one is interested in the slight, darkly dressed teen rushing down the street, narrowly avoiding collision.

Insane. I feel Jewel's presence everywhere. I feel her cold touch even though she's not beside me. And soon I find myself in shadow of my home; I stare up at the tenement and know not even my foster parents can stand between me and what is to come.

"Sae?"

I turn and his face is bloody, soon it will bruise. The relief I feel surprises me, I am pleased he is alive but this is irrelevant because soon I will not be.

His buttercup eyes assess me, he must see how I tremble, the knowledge of death written in my expression and eventually, tranquilly, he holds out his hand.

"Come with me." He says.

There is more danger in his offer than in death, I think. I think of the animal he had become, an elegant black 'wolf, black like the colour of his impossibly dark hair but those eyes had been his eyes filled with keen intellect.

What was he offering? It was an unknown world to me. Maybe what he offered was the _it_ that had been taken from me all those years ago when the rotund Nurse Mary had discovered me. The offer of completeness. The balm for the hurt of my past.

My lashes lower in suspicion. "How can I trust you?" Silly question. I already trust him.

"Because you know me." He replies and there is the subtle sound of irritation in his voice. _He never was very patient. _

"I don't even know myself." I whisper and it savours of bitterness.

My eyes close because this is what I do before I make those kinds of decisions. I carefully consider the darkness behind my eyelids and the bursts of colour from the scar of the neon lights.

I place my hands in his because I want to be the girl he thinks I am. A girl that can love.

* * *

Ms S


End file.
